Thesska clenched his teeth together so hard that he could hear them creak audibly, but he didn’t stop as his subordinate continued his report.

  “Three more clan fleets have reported they were under attack by human forces. Their comm connections went dark shortly after their last communication. Other commanders are demanding to join the hunt, and are starting to show signs of succumbing to their bloodlust. What would you like us to do, Grand Commander?”

  Thesska knew what the humans were up to. They weren’t the first species to try to use the Shican’s bloodlust against them or to try to stall the grand armada. They were the first to realize the Shican’s shortcomings so soon, however. It was galling.

  He knew what he had to do to put an end to their pitiful efforts, but he also knew that giving the order would cost significant losses on his side, further weakening their already fractured fleet. He gave the order anyway.

  “Tell the armada to set course to the closest human world.”

  The subordinate nodded and hurried off to relay the orders while Thesska sat in his command chair.

  These humans are proving to be more difficult than I imagined.

  Thesska had a suspicion that the human’s ability to go toe to toe with the emperor’s chosen vessels was thanks to the unknown aliens who had slipped through his trap. What he truly wanted to do was go back to that world, where they were initially detected, and turn the entire system into a barren wasteland, but doing so would put the armada deep behind enemy lines. A small fleet like his hunting pack had been able to sneak around undetected, but the armada would be noticed the moment it moved, and he couldn’t be certain how many fleets the humans had.

  At first, he thought their pathetic forces had all been accounted for while they battled against the cloned human vessels, but twenty clan fleets, spread out across nearly twenty light-years, had been destroyed in less than two weeks, and an equal number had engaged with human ships.

  There were only two possibilities. Either the humans had some sort of subspace travel, like the unknown aliens, or they had fleets in hiding. Since no such subspace signals had been detected since the unknown alien had led Commander Veshaan and Commander Nyjak into that trap, Thesska had to assume the humans had far more ships than initial estimates reported.

  That meant keeping the armada together and biting away at the humans’ ability to field so many vessels. It was not a very fulfilling tactic, but it would ensure the continuation of their advance, albeit slowly.

  Moving slower than he would like would also allow the reinforcements he ordered from the Empire to arrive. It would also give his technologue on the human clone world more time to start producing warships as well.

  ***

  The armada appeared at their destination a little over a week later. The human border world didn’t have much of a population, but as the armada gathered in preparation for the strike on the planet, Thesska took in their impressive orbital defenses.

  They were the same as the world where the unknown aliens had been detected. It was just further proof that the world was a linchpin. Once he finally pushed to eliminate that world, the rest of the humans would quickly follow. He growled quietly in annoyance, knowing that he would have to wait.

  “What is the enemy’s fleet doing?” he demanded as he watched the icons on the tactical display pull away to the far side of the inhabited world.

  “It appears they are evacuating,” his subordinate said in disgust.

  Thesska wasn’t surprised. The humans had to know the world was lost, no matter how many defenses they had in place. That didn’t mean he was ready to let them just leave. “Set a course to cut them off.”

  Before the order could be carried out, alerts pinged across the ship.

  “Incoming contacts!” someone yelled.

  Explosions bloomed through the armada as the humans’ missiles struck.

  “Where did those come from, and why didn’t the sensor ships pick them up?” Thesska demanded.

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  As he said that, he watched two more of the valuable sensor ships vanish from the fleet. This wasn’t some random trap of opportunity; the humans were targeting those ships. Fury boiled up within him.

  “Protect the sensor ships at all costs!” he roared.

  Another of the hard-to-replace vessels vanished under the missile onslaught before the fleet finally moved into position to protect the remaining ships.

  “FTL departures detected nearby,” someone said.

  The humans had known exactly when and where to target them. His grip tightened on the arm of his chair, the metal groaning under the pressure as the rage threatened to overcome his senses. He felt his implant kick in and flush the chemicals from his mind, allowing him to think clearly once again.

  If the humans had a way to track their fleets through hyperspace, or even just their projected exit point, it would explain how the clan fleets were being picked off.

  Thesska had considered that possibility and had taken steps to deal with it, but he wasn’t sure if they had been completed yet. He turned to his subordinate to find out. “Has the rest of the armada been equipped with the null plates from the resupply ships?”

  The resupply and repair ships carried more than just the null plates. They carried normal gravity plating as well, which was good because the armada had seen quite a few of them fail since arriving in human space.

  Thesska’s technologues were looking into why that was happening, but he didn’t care, so long as they had working replacements.

  “Three-quarters of the armada has been outfitted per your specifications, Grand Commander.”

  “Why hasn’t my order been completed in full?” he asked pointedly.

  The subordinate hissed quietly before responding. “We’ve run out of the new type of plates.”

  Thesska tapped his claw on the arm of his chair for a moment before responding. “If any of the sensor ships are without, have the plates moved from a smaller vessel. Then order the ships without the new modifications to the front of the formation.”

  The order was quickly carried out, while they floated in the human system. There was no point in rushing now. The humans had all jumped away, leaving only their defensive measures. Despite knowing there were no longer any humans on the world, he would smash all the defenses and nuke their cities and any other industrial locations on the surface to ensure they could not come back and use the world after they moved on.

  ***

  SYSTEM: HRíMULFR

  DATE: 2404

  Kaela watched as the Shican reorganized their formation. Her job was to determine if an attack from the stealth ships was possible. After their first strike on the enemy’s sensor capabilities, the Shican had kept a close eye on those remaining vessels.

  So instead of hitting them a second time, her small crew could only watch as the Shican slowly dismantled the automated defenses around the planet of Skarn.

  Kaela knew that Vitor had hoped his attacks would be enough to get the Shican to back off, but Char didn’t believe that they would, and she had been right. It was a good thing that Lagertha Char had convinced the Jarl to evacuate the planet weeks ago. Even then, the last of the people had barely made it into orbit when the enemy arrived.

  She had seen what was about to happen and acted. Their strike would have been better timed if they had waited for the enemy to be engaged with the planetary defenses, but she didn’t regret her decision. It bought the fleeing ships enough time to reach a safe jump distance and leave the system.

  Their planetary defenses were falling swiftly under the combined barrage of nearly six hundred vessels, but they weren’t going down quietly. By the time the last orbital laser was destroyed, the enemy had lost fifteen ships.

  It wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but it had come without the loss of a single human life.

  Her people recorded everything and left just as the Shican started nuking the cities from orbit.

  ***

  “The sensor ships have recorded more outbound jumps, Grand Commander.”

  Thesska snarled. So they had kept a force here to watch him. He had assumed they would after they targeted the sensor ships, but it was good to have confirmation. Once they finished clearing out the system of any further human facilities, he would need to jump into interstellar space and rendezvous with the resupply ships.

  The ships without null plates would be forced to wait there, because his next plan required jumping far deeper into a gravity well than they were capable of.

  That would come soon; for now, he watched in satisfaction as mushroom clouds rose into the planet’s atmosphere. Normally, he wouldn’t have been so wasteful with such weapons, both because habitable worlds were not exactly easy to come by, but also because the armada only carried a few dozen in the resupply fleet to crack extremely difficult targets. That all changed when his technologue had informed him of Commander Sivarra’s stockpile of thousands of the devices, built to Shican missile specifications, instead of human ones.

  The man may have been a failure to his race, but at least he had done something correctly.

  Thesska’s technologue had all the devices loaded aboard human ships and taken to the armada’s resupply staging area, finally giving the pathetic vessels something useful to do. She had reported that the enrichment facilities had been destroyed by the humans shortly after. He laughed when he learned the humans had shown up too late to stop the transfer.

  He would love to shove the fact in their faces, but he couldn’t, so he would have to settle for using the devices on them instead.

  The bombardment was a slow affair and took a full two days to complete before Thesska was satisfied that nothing of substance remained for the humans if they ever returned. Once the bombardment ceased, he ordered the fleet to finish clearing the system before he plotted their next destination. It was time to make the humans understand just how outclassed they were.

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